At 4:36 PM -0600 3/27/02, David Starner wrote:
>Why isn't there exterior evidence? IIRC, there was some traffic between
>the Roman empire and parts east; given the detail of Chinese history,
>can't some Chinese emperor be matched to a Roman emperor and years be
>counted off from there? It really seems like the people who would have
>noticed the missing years if they really existed would be the people
>trying to look at non-European history.
>
I'm not sure there was close enough contact to make that sort of
correlation. There was trade between India and China and the Roman
Empire, but probably a lot of it was of the form Chinese merchant
trades with Indian merchant trades with Persian merchant trades with
Greek merchant trades with Roman merchant. I'm not sure how many
people actually made the journey personally. As states, they were
probably only dimly aware of each other. The notable exceptions until
modern times were Alexander and Genghis Khan who each conquered large
swaths of intermediate territory, and thus simplified trade routes;
but neither of them quite made the final connection or a lasting one.
(and of course Genghis Khan wasn't born until the 1100s)
I did ask a historian friend who specializes in the Middle East about
this recently. He told me that the Islamic world really didn't take
much notice of Europe until after the period in question so it's not
really possible to match up the Islamic calendar to events in Europe
during or before the Dark Ages. If the hypothesis proved to be true,
Islamic history probably wouldn't be affected very much at all.
--+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java news: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML news: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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